The fierce struggle at Bentonville which for a time seemed of very doubtful issue, was the last battle of consequence fought between Sherman and Johnston.
Let us go back now to Petersburg, where the hour of the final struggle drew near. The reader has already been told of Lee's effort to compel Grant to contract his lines south and west of Petersburg. That effort was made on the night of the twenty-fourth of March and the morning of the twenty-fifth.
The spring was advancing now. The roads were hardening. Grant had all the force that he could use and more. His army vastly outnumbered the remnant of Lee's. His equipment was as perfect as good organization and a lavish expenditure of money could make it. With an unseen railroad skirting his rear and a fleet at his base he could concentrate as heavy a force as he pleased at any point he might select on Lee's line. Moreover the extension of the Federal line to the left had placed the two armies in such position that if Grant could crush or break through Lee's right wing, Richmond would be completely cut off, and the successful retreat of Lee's army would be impossible.
It was Grant's plan to do precisely this. To that end he sent three strong divisions under General Ord to strengthen his extreme left, where General Sheridan commanded. Then he ordered Sheridan to push forward through Dinwiddie Court House to Five Forks and assail the enemy there.
Battle was joined on the thirty-first of March, but so great was the resisting power of the sadly depleted Confederate army, that Sheridan was hurled back and compelled to appeal to Grant for help. On the first of April, strongly reinforced, Sheridan again advanced to the attack, and after a bloody contest succeeded in carrying the position, taking about 5,000 prisoners, the very flower of the Confederate troops.
The work of ending the war was now on, and Grant prosecuted it vigorously. At daybreak on April the second he assaulted the center of Lee's line near Petersburg, broke through it at two points, and by pressing Lee hard on his right made a practical end of Confederate resistance in that quarter.
There was nothing left to Lee but to abandon Richmond and Petersburg and go into a retreat which was sure to be marked at every step by fierce fighting, but which was clearly hopeless from its beginning. His only chance was to fall back through Virginia, place himself behind the Roanoke river, form a junction there with Johnston's army and make one last, desperate stand against armies overwhelmingly superior to his own in all except courage and dogged determination. That chance was so slender, by reason of the situation, that only a high heroism would have regarded it even as a possibility.